Tomoko Yonezu: The Activist at the Intersection of Women's Liberation and Disability Rights in Japan

Tomoko Yonezu: The Activist at the Intersection of Women's Liberation and Disability Rights in Japan

This article relates to Hunchback

In Hunchback, protagonist Shaka considers writing her dissertation on Tomoko Yonezu, a women's liberation and disability rights activist. Yonezu may be most known for attempting to spray paint the Mona Lisa when it came to Tokyo in 1974, as a protest against the museum refusing access to disabled people who needed assistance. But she's also particularly interesting because she represents the intersection of two different, and sometimes contentious, social movements of the time—the Women's Liberation movement (ūman ribu), and the disability rights movement—an intersection that influenced decades of advocacy for bodily autonomy and against eugenics in Japan.

The story of this intersection starts in 1972, when the government attempted to revise the Eugenic Protection Law (EPL) and limit access to legal abortions in Japan after pro-life lobbying, writes Anna-Viktoria Vittinghoff in her dissertation on Yonezu. The proposed changes were to eliminate the "economic reasons clause," which allowed people to get abortions for financial reasons (the most common reason for abortions up to that point), and to add in a "selective abortion clause" or "foetal clause," which allowed abortions based on fetal abnormalities.

The Women's Liberation movement protested against the proposed removal of the economic clause: they were fighting for a woman's right to choose and rejecting the state's intervention into women's bodies and reproduction. However, they didn't have a stance on the fetal clause—a clause that disability activist groups saw as an attack on their right to live (or the right to be born). Vittinghoff writes that ribu's fight against the proposed EPL "from the perspective of women's rights and bodily autonomy [only], was understood by the disability movement...as reaffirmation of eugenics and the continuous discrimination of disabled people in Japan."

But Yonezu, who was then a ribu member and was disabled herself, spearheaded workshops and discussions with disability activists, which gradually made ribu rethink their position. In an interview with Vittinghoff, Yonezu explained that many disabled women felt anger toward abled women because of the way they thought about abortion:

"Disabled women, in particular, did not have much sympathy for a woman without a disability saying that she should decide for herself whether or not to have a child either. Given that as disabled women they are told not to have a baby, they are forced to have sterilisations, they are told to have an abortion and so they have. They don't have agency over their own bodies...In the end, the same way that disabled people are killed or excluded or told not to have children, women are told not to have children or to only have healthy children. The root cause for it is the same, isn't it? Namely the Eugenic Protection Law."

In other words, Yonezu recognized that the state's control of women's bodies as a method of population control was both a violation of the rights of disabled people and a violation of the rights of women to self-determination: the two causes were inseparable. Yonezu was therefore crucial in ribu's subsequent alliance with disabled activist groups, an alliance "to challenge the ideology behind the EPL that takes away the agency of women, able bodied or disabled alike, rather than fighting each other," as Vittinghoff explains. The alliance was not total or without conflict, but the two movements cooperated, learned from each other, and continued to do so even after the government abandoned the attempt to revise the EPL.

Filed under Society and Politics

This article relates to Hunchback. It will run in the March 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.